a Content ID. But I would realize that
not all Internet routers recognize that,
so I would include a second ID, which
is a Host ID. If the router does not un-
derstand the first one, it can look at the
second or third, and it will basically act
on the first one that it recognizes. For
backward compatibility, that last ID
could be an IP address.”
For security, XIA borrowed an idea
from a prior NSF-funded project, Ac-
countable Internet Protocol (AIP): in-
corporating a cryptographic ID in ad-
dresses so they can be authenticated
through a public-private key challenge.
Steenkiste says the project uses this
scheme so it does not have to rely on
key-management infrastructure, as
both NDN and MobilityFirst do.
He also explained how such embedded authentication allows duplication
not only of content, but also of dynamic
services like entire websites. “You could
replicate services using a public key,
but then you could end up replicating
a private key on a lot of devices. In XIA,
there is one public-private key pair for
the global service; then, there are basic public key pairs with each instance.
They are all tied together with a certificate that is issued by the service’s owner, not a global certificate authority. The
instances cannot hand the service off to
others because they cannot sign for it:
their private keys are not authoritative.”
the Growth of everything
Three themes are consistent in these
projects’ approaches: the Internet is
growing in terms of not only numbers,
but also diversity; the current seven-
layer OSI model needs adjustment to
move it away from host-centric net-
working; security must be a first-order
concern in every data transaction, not
only at the endpoints. These changes
require fundamentally different ways
of thinking about networking from
those currently in play.
Yet for Internet users, the basic experience should remain the same. As
PARC’s Edens put it when speaking of
CCN, “The seven-layer model is getting
pretty darn tired, but if we continue to
solve the problems that we have set out
to solve, you should be able to interact with the content network just like
you interact with the Web. You ask for
content, and you get it back — you do
not care whether it is cached or comes
from the original publisher. But with
intelligent routers, you can have things
like dynamic rerouting, error recovery,
and broadcasting. You can put all these
functions into the network as services.”
Or, as NSF’s Fisher noted, “We
never expected the FIA projects would
replace the current Internet, although
some project evangelists are motivated
by that as a holy grail. In either case,
these projects can have a very large impact. That is very exciting.”
Further Reading
nSF Future Internet Architecture Project,
national Science Foundation, http://www.
nets-fia.net
VnI (Visual networking Index) Mobile
Forecast highlights, 2012-2017, Cisco
Systems, Inc., http://www.cisco.com/web/
solutions/sp/vni/vni_mobile_forecast_
highlights/ index.html.
Raychaudhuri, D., Nagaraja, K.,
Venkataramani, A.
MobilityFirst: A Robust and Trustworthy
Mobility-Centric Architecture for the
Future Internet. Draft, August 2012. http://
mobilityfirst.winlab.rutgers.edu/documents/
MobilityFirst_paper_MC2R_v10.pdf
Zhang, L., Estrin, D., Burke, J., Jacobson, V.,
Thornton, J. D., Smetters, D. K., et al. (2010)
named Data networking (nDn) Project. PARC
Tech Report 2010-003 nDn-0001, PARC.
Han, D., Anand, A., Dogar, F., Li, B., Lim, H.,
Machado, M., et al. (2012)
XIA: Efficient support for evolvable
internetworking. Proc. 9th USEnIX nSDI.
Tom Geller is an oberlin, ohio-based science, technology,
and business writer.
© 2013 aCm 0001-0782/13/10 $15.00
names and numbers can be domain-specific. “The name certification service is somewhat similar in spirit to
what ICANN provides for domain
names,” said Raychaudhuri, “but
there’s no central authority, so you can
accept any NCS that you trust. For a device that’s part of my car, the NCS could
be the auto manufacturer.”
Raychaudhuri believes the use of
practically inexhaustible GUIDs will
prevent the sort of unstable and “
roundabout” process now needed to get mobile devices on the Internet. “If you
have a smartphone, you get a private
IP address from the cell provider, then
there is a public IP address in a gateway
at the boundary of the cellular network.
That gateway is a potential bottleneck
or single point of failure. With MobilityFirst, a mobile device does not have
to go through the gateway. No matter
what network you are connected to, the
global name resolution in MobilityFirst
will find your current location.”
Addressing unknown unknowns
MobilityFirst prioritizes issues of mo-
bile accessibility; NDN focuses on con-
tent. A third FIA-funded project takes
an agnostic approach in forecasting the
Internet’s needs. The eXpressive Inter-
net Architecture (XIA) project divides
Internet players into “principals” such
as hosts, content, services, and users.
While identifying such current princi-
pals, it acknowledges that tomorrow’s
Internet may have other types of prin-
cipals, and is built to adapt when they
appear. Whatever the principal type of
a network resource, XIA describes a way
to reach it directly through a new eX-
pressive Internet Protocol (XIP). As prin-
cipal investigator and Carnegie Mellon
University professor Peter Steenkiste
said, “If we look forward to 10 years
from now, are we really sure that con-
tent and services will be the hot com-
modity? That is absolutely not clear:
there might be a change in the types of
entities that people will want to send.”
Steenkiste described how an XIA
requestor packet could get a satisfying
response even when points on the net-
work do not understand its new-form
destination type. “The current Internet
thinks of packets as having a destina-
tion address with one type of ID, such
as an IP address,” he said. “In XIA, I
would request a piece of content with
“if we continue to
solve the problems
that we have set out
to solve, you should
be able to interact
with the content
network just
like you interact
with the Web.”